Computer devices are becoming ever more ubiquitous, and more and more of people's day-to-day activities involve computer devices. During the course of a day, a user may carry out many activities using one or more computer devices—such as watching videos, listening to music, browsing the web, using a chat or communication program, working on a document or presentation, or playing a game, among others.
In many cases, a user may be concurrently carrying out multiple activities using even a single computer device. Increasingly, people desire and need to carry out activities involving, and between, multiple computer devices. For example, a user may engage in a work-related activity using multiple different computer devices, such as a smartphone, work desktop computer, laptop computer, and home desktop computer. A user may start watching an entertainment program on their laptop computer, but may wish to continue watching on their smartphone or tablet computer at a later time. A user may start researching a topic on the web at work on their desktop computer, and continue their research on a smartphone or tablet computer during their commute home.
As computer devices are used for a larger number of activities, and become more integrated into people's lives, it can become challenging for a user to track their activities and associated content. For example, a user may wish to access a web page the user browsed two days earlier, but may not remember the address of the web page, or how they found it. A user may have been listening to a song on their computer device, or watching a video, but may no longer remember the title of the song or video.
In some cases, a computer device, such as an individual application running on the computer device or an operating system of the computer device, may provide some limited functionality for a user to try and trace their activity. For example, an operating system component may allow the user to view of a list of recently created or modified files. A web browser may allow a user to access a history of web pages visited by the user.
However, at least certain information regarding activities, such as files opened by a user, but not modified by the user, may not be available to the user. Even when information is available, the specific information in which the user is interested may be intermixed with voluminous amounts of other information. For instance, the address of a web page a user wants to find may be intermixed with information for scores of other web pages the user visited on a particular day. If the user cannot remember the particular day they visited the web page, the task becomes even more challenging and frustrating.
Commonly, users engage in multiple activities with one or more computer devices in order to accomplish a particular task. For a work project, a user may carry out activities using a web browser, a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation authoring program, among others. Many of these activities may be carried out concurrently. Thus, in order to resume work on a project, a user may need to resume a prior state of multiple different activities, compounding the problems noted above. In addition, the use of multiple applications to carry out tasks can complicate trying to engage in the task on different computer devices.
For instance to continue work on a task that the user originally engaged in on a desktop computer on a laptop computer, a user may have to manually find the relevant files, transfer them from the desktop computer, open each application, and then return to the point where they left off working for each application—such as a particular slide of a presentation, or page of a document, the user was creating or editing. This scenario further assumes that the relevant applications are already installed on the laptop computer. Thus, room for improvement remains for tracking a user's tasks and activities on one or more computer devices, making the information easily and intelligently accessible to the user, and allowing a user to easily resume a task or activity.